--- On Wed, 8/4/09, Paley, Irina wrote:
> I use your exact code for mlogit, adapted to my dataset, and
> when I run margeff I get that it's invalid syntax. What do
> you mean by leaving out reference category?
Say you want to controll for gender, than there are two dummies:
male (indicating who is male) and female (indicating who is
female). These two variables contain superfluous information (if
you know that someone isn't male than she is probably a female).
Because of that you can't add both variables in a regression,
and you need to leave one of these two out of your model. The
variable you leave out is called the reference category. The
same is true for your state dummies, you need to leave one of the
states out.
As you created your dummies using -xi3- this already happened, so
this is not the problem. However, given that some of the state
dummies have missing values on the standard errors suggests that
there is still a problem with your model: you just don't have
enough information in your data to add all the state dummies.
The easiest solution would be if you could find nearby states
that are sort of similar to the problematic states, and merge
these into "super states". So, States 50 54 2 30 46 and 72 are
problematic (they either have a missing value on the standard
error or they have been dropped outright due to
multiconlinearity) and asssume that state 50 is close to State
51, and state 54 to state 3 . Than you can create the "supper
states" by making a copy of the variable state and use -recode-:
gen state2 = state
recode state2 (50=51) (54=3) etc.
And than you use state2 instead of state in your -mlogit- model.
Hope this helps,
Maarten
-----------------------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Institut fuer Soziologie
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tuebingen
Germany
http://home.fsw.vu.nl/m.buis/
-----------------------------------------
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